


dear diary

by brucewaynery



Series: iron man bingo fills [2]
Category: Marvel
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, M/M, Post-Break Up, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Tony Stark Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 09:59:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19809967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brucewaynery/pseuds/brucewaynery
Summary: Tony finds one of his diaries from 2015.(Takes place just before hoco)





	dear diary

Tony’s trying very hard not to think about St- _Rogers_ at all, really, but especially now, when he’s meant to be clearing out his workshop. He could get someone to do it, has, for the most part, he is a billionaire after all, but it doesn’t feel right, his workshop is his sanctum sanctorum, the first place he went when he got back from Siberia, their bedroom too much. It’s the last place he goes through, a week before the official move upstate.

His therapist said that the move will do him good, that the new place might give him a better mindset. And that he won’t see him in every corner of his house anymore.

It still feels like betrayal, somehow, even though Tony knows that it wasn’t himself who was in the wrong, Rogers said so, in that letter. Rhodey suggested burning that bastard letter, and the flip-phone, but Tony still can’t bring himself to destroy it, despite how much he hates Rogers.

It feels like betrayal because it’s Rogers’ first home in the 21st century, it’s where he fell in love with him, it’s where he found more of his family. But he can’t hold on to memories forever, according to his therapist.

So he tries.

When he gets to the workshop, he finds most things already tidy, courtesy of FRIDAY (god, he misses JARVIS) through Dum-E, U, and Butterfingers, everything that isn’t password/lock-and-key protected is all packed and in the hangar, ready to be put on the quinjet.

All he has left, really, is the drawer, his servers, computers and the like.

He’s always been drawn to technology, so he tackles that first. It doesn’t take long, a lot less time than he wanted. He powers everything off, with a goodbye to FRIDAY. He doesn’t know if he wants to revive JARVIS for the compound, or keep FRIDAY, he’s lived his entire life with a JARVIS of some sorts, and in the year that he didn’t, everything fell to batshit. But he has to move on.

(But he misses JARVIS like a son and a father at the same time and he would go to the ends of the earth-- he would keep himself healthy, alive and safe for him.)

He banks the thought for another day and carries on cleaning out the drawers of his desks, finding mostly old drives and abandoned blueprints. All of that’s done faster than he wanted because now, that bastard drawer is the only thing left, _mocking_ him.

The old, sharpie’d-on scrawl of ‘Steve’ has long since been scrubbed off - probably when he was drunk, or Dum-E - however, the carved-in ‘S.R.G’ is still there, albeit small, but there. When he opens it, slowly, like he’s expecting something to jump out, a snake, maybe, but to his relief, it’s no different to how it was months ago, with the very latest addition at the top. (Tony locked away the letter, after he managed to memorise it, on the advice of everyone around him, but he still carries the flip-phone with him. He made a promise and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t go through with it.)

Under that is drawings upon drawings, some on art paper, some on napkins, or the back of mission reports, all of them have something to do with Tony or the bots, all signed ‘S.G.R’.  
Tony’s almost ashamed to admit that burning them doesn’t even cross his mind.

It's not the last, or the only, thing he left him, but there’s something so fundamentally raw and _human_ about them, qualities that Tony honest-to-god didn’t believe that he had back when they first met. Even the pictures, they make _Tony_ look human, reachable, touchable, he doesn’t know how he did it (he does, he told him, but it feels all like a lie now anyway), but there’s more life to them than the actual, professional photoshoots he has to do sometimes. Hell, he even made the ‘bots seem more than decades old bolts and metal. (They are so much more than that, but only to Tony, and, seemingly, him.)

Under all of those is a black, leather-bound notebook. He takes it out and sits down, tracing his fingers over the embossed ‘Anthony E. Stark’ on the cover. It’s a diary. One that his therapist encouraged him to write in, properly, with a pen and everything, ever since he started the whole ‘therapy’ thing. Tony had been against it, vehemently, because of the Ol’ Stark Ideals™ but Charles convinced him to write in it at least a few times, when he felt like it, on important and mundane days alike. 

This black one is his third, starting March 2015. He knows what most of the entries are about, dumb stuff that made him feel like he is reliving the middle-school experience he didn't have. There’s a big part of him that wants to burn it, or ‘accidentally’ let Dum-E have it, but before he knows it, he’s slipping off the elastic and flipping it open on a random page.

> __
> 
> 18th May, 2015  
>  Steve’s a moron. I think I’m in love with him.
> 
> __

__  


That’s all that’s written on that page, with a tiny drawing of Avengers’ tower stuck under it with tape. He quickly turns the page, only to be faced with another entry about Steve, and then one about the Avengers, and then more Steve and then something about Dum-E finally learning how to make good smoothies, and then more Steve, then Steve and Steve and Steve, all the way until last April, when his name isn’t written, in favour of ‘Rogers’, or, memorably, when he was drunk, ‘traitor’ and ‘liar’.

All it does is make him angry again, angry at what he lost, what Steve threw away, it brings back all the feelings he had for him, still does, however much he claims to not, but this time, tinged and overcast with bitterness. He wants to regret it so badly, he wishes he did, he wishes he could wish that he never met Steve, that Afghanistan never happened, or Steve was never found, or never picked for the super-soldier project, but he can’t. He knows, more than anything, that meeting Steve, knowing him, falling in love with him was one of the best, and worst, things to ever happen to him, and if anything happened in any different way then the world would be a very, very different place.

He’s lost in his own mind and memories, skimming over the pages of the diary, when something in his pocket vibrates, loud and obnoxious. _The fucking flip phone._

Tony can barely get it out of his pocket, that’s how bad his hand is shaking, but he does and ‘Steve is calling’ flashes up on the screen.

Tony throws it across the room.

Dum-E catches it.

Tony waits until it’s stopped vibrating, and then another five minutes for good measure, before encouraging Dum-E to throw it back to him. Surprisingly, he throws it perfectly. “I’m gonna give you another upgrade, buddy,” Tony mumbles, smiling when Dum-E chirps happily and finally opens the phone.

> You have one new message  
>  [play] [delete]

**Author's Note:**

> lmao im getting slow at these  
> any comments/kudos mean the world!  
> theres a rebloggable post of this fic [here](https://tonys-stars.tumblr.com/tagged/ironmanbingo2019) if you feel so inclined


End file.
